LOVE DECODED

Love Decoded

The four letter magic word has been a source of great inspiration for life to evolve on this planet. Infact love is the essence of life itself, bridging the (apparent) wide gulf among various living beings and also between the living and non-living. Love is omnipresent and omnipotent, which however is under a thick veil of ignorance. Once this ignorance fades away, love blossoms. The understanding of such a key life process holds a great significance in a world that is rapidly being engulfed in a array of life-destroying rifts and tensions. In India it acquires a greater importance, for our country being a multi-ethnical, multi-racial, multi-lingual and don’t know a home to how many more such multi’s. Hence, I present my understanding of this process called love. I don’t propose nor intend to propose a THEORY regarding love. It needs to be seen as an amateur’s attempt to study love.

Different Levels of LoveEverything and anything, tangible and intangible, is rooted in love. However, when seen closely there are various levels of it. The most basic level of love is pertaining to one’s sense gratification.

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Falling in love with what you see, what you touch, what you hear, what you taste, and what you smell, falls into this category. “Lust” is the keyword at this level. The next level is relates to one’s mind. It is a level wherein the bodily senses at times might be silent but one’s mind is constantly engaged in a relation with the object of love. At this level your mind accepts the object of love and the connection with that object is retained in the human memory. This can be best explained by the dreams of the object of love during sleep. The next level of love pertains to one’s intelligence wherein the one makes a choice to make or not the ‘obsession’ of his/her permanent. This stage is also marked by a deep sense of possession, which when not managed properly could be a cause of distress at times. This also brings us to the point that there is an element of discretion in love. i.e. we love because we choose to love. People who close out their minds from falling in love, will hardly be able to receive love when given. Such a mindset doesn’t last long because the moment the web of ignorance and pessimism that one has weaved around oneself starts thinning, love prevails. The distinction between these stages is not sharp and often we see sufficient overlapping of all the three. However, it is clear that love tends to be unstable when the component of the lower level exceeds that of a higher level. Though in most of the cases the initiation of love is through senses, it is quite possible to start at a higher level. For example, one may hear great things about a tourist place, say Switzerland, and imagine such a place and fall in love with it without even seeing it.Now, let us try to examine the most common forms of love that we experience everyday.‘Love at first sight’ or for that matter at any sight is the stage of sense gratification, which at that level is commonly referred to as infactuation. This may or may not move up to an higher level. Similarly, the love for a particular kind of music, food, fashion, place or art generally starts as reaction towards them by one’s senses. The love of intangible or abstract objects is actually a curiosity to create an identity for oneself. ‘ I love my Nation’ or ‘I love my college’ or ‘I love cricket’ are nothing but an attempt to carve a niche for oneself. Long association with a place generally makes people difficult to move out of it sighting ATTACHMENT as a reason is actually because of the fear of losing his/her identity associated with it. Brotherly love or love for ones siblings, friends, and family develops with long close associations. Marriages and family are the social systems created to facilitate such long associations. Lack of sufficient understanding of the need, essence and practicality of such systems is the root of degrading family values and a culture of intolerance often resulting in early divorces. Further, Marriages must not to be seen as an essential sequel to love for the former is a man made arrangement for maintaining a order in a society and essentially a means to discover love, while the latter is eternal reality sustaining the life in the world. Hence marriages can fail but the love cannot. Apart from these three levels of love which are very common, there exists two more layers which needs a greater understanding and of a greater importance. “Transcendence- is the word to describe the journey of love from the three lower levels to this one. In this stage, the love transcends beyond any material, emotional and intellectual needs. It becomes truly unconditional. The existence of the lover becomes meaningless without the object of love. The ego or the i-sense completely vanishes between them. A mother’s love for his child comes closest to this stage. The observation that the mother-child bonding is so strong stems out of the fact that the love between them starts at this higher level. Some marital relations, though very rare, attain this level. The lovers in this stage can be best described as soulmates. Unlike the lower levels where in the love can travel both ways - up and down the level, there is no going down at this stage; it can only move up the ladder of love.The highest manifestation of love lies is uncovering the veil of ignorance completely and discovering the love in its truest form. This is the stage of universal love. It is an extension of the previous stage, where the lover’s object of love extends to every being – living and non-living. Ultimately, the lover, the object of love and the love itself loses distinct identities and becomes ONE. This is a stage where everything converges into ‘nothing’. It is a stage of TOTAL FREEDOM. There is no going back from this level, it just sustains leaving the lover in a stage of total bliss. According to me, the journey to attain such a freedom is not humanely possible. However, even an attempt to reach such a stage is sufficient to understand the purpose of life. If even an attempt is difficult, then the very knowledge of the path to such a stage of bliss is definitely more than enough to develop a sense of compassion, tolerance and co-existence.